Jammin' With Joy Series

“How to Deal with the Way I Feel” part 5

(Jammin’ with Joy)

Brian A. Moon

A man working in New York City at a very stressful marketing job was asked to take the next 3 days off and spend time amongst the people of the city probing them with questions about some of the products that they were marketing. It had been cold and wet in the city for the past week as a cold winter storm had been blowing through until the man woke up on his first of three days off to bright and sunny skies. As he got ready for the excursion out amongst the people he reached into his pants pocket and found a $100 dollar bill. As he is walking out enjoying the sunshine in central park he stops at a hot dog stand for lunch and the hot dog vendor had run out of change so he gave the man his lottery ticket and told him that if they won he would split ½ of it with him. Later that day as he is talking amongst the people he runs into this beautiful woman who ask him if he wants to escort her to a dinner, and he says sure! When the woman arrives to pick him up she is in a stretch limousine and it turns out that she is the queen of some small European city-state who is heading to a United Nations dinner with the President of the United States. As they are driving to the dinner he flips on the T.V in the car right as the numbers are being given for that nights lottery with an estimated grand prize of 35 million dollars. As he arrives on his first day off, at the nicest hotel in New York, with this beautiful queen on his arm, he now realizes that he just won the lottery.

For the past 4 weeks we have been talking about “How to Deal with the Way I Feel” and all four of those weeks were on how to deal with negative emotions like stress or anger. Sometimes though life is good to us, sometimes we do feel like we are walking on cloud 9, and our emotion could be classified as nothing but pure joy! Life is not always a negative experience…

We have all had those days when everything actually does go right, and we are in a good mood full of happiness and life. We have all experienced that feeling of, “Wow I am just glad to be alive to enjoy this moment!” Even though joy is a good emotion, it doesn’t mean that there is not a right and a wrong way to deal with it.

Back in colonial times here in America there was a common practice of shooting off guns when people wanted to express joy or when they wanted to celebrate something positive. Men would run out into the streets and fire their pistols off into the air, and it was not uncommon to be in a crowd of people celebrating something and have hundreds of gun shots scream into the sky. There is only one problem with this expression of joy, what goes up must come down. What would happen is the shots that were fired high into the sky would eventually come soaring down and right back into the crowd of people. More than one person has been killed all because of stray bullets falling out of the sky and into some early American celebration.

Life can be joyous and we should not feel bad when we do get to celebrate and shout for joy, but we also need to remember that joy is a gift. That’s right, joy is a gift and just like with any other gift we can use it for good things or bad things. To make sure that we stay “Jammin’ with Joy” and using this gift for good we need to:

Give credit where credit is due

Remembering that joy is a gift, don’t you think it would be important to give credit to the person that gave it to you? But where does this gift of joy come from? The Bible says:

“Every good gift and every perfect present comes from heaven; it comes down from God” James 1:17 TEV

Circle the words “good gift” and “from God”

Joy is a gift from God! God wants us to have a good time here on earth! God gave you 5 senses just so that you can feel, smell, and see things that give us joy.

In fact he even gave us the emotional capability to experience joy and happiness! If God wanted you to have a bad time here on earth, then he would have taken away your senses and only given you the ability to experience stress, heartbreak, and fear. But he loves us, he gets excited when he sees us having a good time and it gives him great joy to bless us with joy. When we have joy, when we are given a good and perfect gift from above, our first response should be to give credit where credit is due. Give God the credit he deserves for sending some joyful experience your way.